Thunderbird Profile

[allo-]

It would be nice to generate Thunderbird profiles as well. Thunderbird sends for example the current hostname as HELO to the SMTP server.

The settings part can be mostly unchanged. What needs investigation:

• [ ] Does installing extensions work the same way (Is it the same parameter to allow preinstalled extensions)?
• [ ] How to handle settings, which contain a profile ID in the setting name?

For most people it will not be clear, which of their accounts is the first one (index 0) and which the second one (index 1), but it gets even more complicated when they created and deleted accounts and their current two accounts now have the indices 2 and 5.

This probably needs first a way to identify which account has which index, and then an infrastructure change in the profile generator to generate settings for a specific ID / list of IDs.

[Atavic]

See extensions.strictCompatibility here.

[allo-]

No, the compatibility will be removed sooner or later anyway.

I need to test, which setting allows installing extensions by placing them in the profile, like here: https://github.com/allo-/firefox-profilemaker/blob/31b6453366adfbff7fc8a2135350194762a57dd0/views.py#L95

[Atavic]

A value of 14 allows automatic installation from the current user’s profile only.

See: https://mike.kaply.com/2012/02/21/understanding-add-on-scopes/

Section called Firefox Settings: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Distribution_options/Add-ons_in_the_enterprise

[allo-]

That's why the code is in there for firefox. Did you test it for thunderbird? Then we can check the first point and think about the second one.

[Atavic]

No, but will try.

[allo-]

I guess it works and trying is not too complicated. I am currently thinking about the settings with a profile id in there. Probably this would be something an addon could handle better, but the new addon api probably does not allow for such deep access anymore.

Does thunderbird has some equivalent to about:support? Something where a user can see the IDs of their accounts?

[Atavic]

I use Sea Monkey that's Firefox and Thunderbird together.

about:support on Firefox and Sea Monkey have the same Troubleshooting Information. about:profiles is also the same with Root Directory and Local Directory for every profile.

Hope it helps.

[allo-]

It needs an easy way to open this in the e-mail program alone.

Config variables like mail.server.server3.cleanupBodies and mail.smtpserver.smtp4.port contain indices. An IMAP account has a serverX index, but the outgoing server has a separate smtpX index and an identity has a separate mail.identity.idX index.

An identity belongs to an account and uses a specific smtp server. A smtp server may belong to different accounts and different identities.

If a user has multiple accounts and identities and maybe deleted an account and added another one, it gets intransparent which settings belong to which identity/imap server/smtp server.

Maybe the IDs can be read by addons? Then someone could create an addon, which allows to see which account has which ID, so the user can give the site the right ids.

Or we just set values, which do not belong to any accounts. Especially when the user generates a profile before adding accounts, there isn't any ID yet. I am not sure how many per-account settings may be really useful.

And with an long used profile, I have entries like

user_pref("mail.account.account18.identities", "id13,id11,id14");

for a setup with three accounts (IMAP server + settings + reference to a SMTP server) and six identities (That's what you can select in the compose window as "From:", (real name + e-mail address + signature)). Still it has IDs up to 18, because I added and removed accounts and it seems to keep counting (or at least use max_id+1 from the current configured accounts).

[Atavic]

Where are stored all those variables you listed above?

[allo-]

In your profile folder (e.g. .thunderbird/asdfasdf.default/ for linux systems) is a prefs.js file, just like the the Firefox preferences file.